Indian manufacturing giant is suing for use of its logo in a spoof computer game highlighting port’s threat to local wildlife

* Adam Vaughan
* Monday 26 July 2010 17.13 BST

The Indian manufacturing giant Tata is suing Greenpeace India over a computer game it has created to publicise the alleged impact on turtles from the company’s development of a new port.

The Pac-Man-style game is defamatory and an abuse of copyright, Tata Sons, Tata companies’ bulk shareholder, said on Friday at the New Delhi high court. The court has served notice to Greenpeace, which has until tomorrow to respond to the lawsuit.

Greenpeace India launched the game at the start of June, the latest step in its seven-year campaign against Dhamra port, which is due to open this summer at Bhadrak in Orissa, a state on India’s eastern coast. The environmental group alleges that the development will endanger local turtles. Turtle Vs. Tata, which is still live online and has been played by nearly 25,000 people, places a turtle in the role of Pac-Man battling against Tata logos in the place of ghosts.

Tata is a huge international conglomerate with revenues of $70.8bn in 2008-09. It owns Jaguar Land Rover and the steel company Corus in the UK.

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Areeba Hamid, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace India, told the Guardian the case had no merit either on grounds of copyright infringement or defamation. She added they will not change the game unless the court directs them to.

Ashish Fernandes, oceans campaigner for Greenpeace India, said: “This is a desperate attempt to stifle the growing criticism over their port project, and divert attention from the real issue of the impact it will have on a biodiversity-rich area. Public opinion is on the side of the turtles – over 150,000 Indians, leading scientists and turtle biologists, politicians and national NGOs have come out against the port. By first ignoring and now trying to silence these voices, Tata has shown that it cares only about its bottom line, and not the environment.”

Tata Steel is jointly developing the new port in a 50:50 project with L&T, another Indian conglomerate. …

Greenpeace has been campaigning against the port since 2003. The group says the developers’ environmental impact assessment report was flawed. It describes the site as “ecologically sensitive”, noting that it is 5km from India’s second largest mangrove forest, the Bhitarkanika Sanctuary, and less than 15km from Gahirmatha nesting beaches, the world’s largest mass nesting site for Olive Ridley turtles. Hamid added the NGOS was also concerned about a white-bellied snake and a frog that a 2007 Greenpeace assessment of the site found were the first recorded instances of the species on the Indian mainland. The case begins tomorrow.

Health and safety campaigners have demanded that company directors be held personally accountable for “serial killing workers” after yet another employee was killed at a Corus steelworks: here.

A petition signed by over 30,000 people against a planned mine expansion in India will be delivered to the mining company on Wednesday: here.

Action Aid and Amnesty International have dismissed attempts by British mining firm Vedanta to play down its alleged pollution and human rights abuses in India before its AGM in London: here.

British transnational Vedanta Resources has been told by India’s environment ministry to immediately halt all construction work on its aluminium refinery in the Indian state of Orissa: here.

The income of the top 1% in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past three decades: here.

With his Aug. 6 ouster, HP’s Mark Hurd joins a cast of disgraced CEOs who have been forced to leave the companies they once guided. TIME takes a look at executive scandals that rocked the business world: here.

Cristina Diaz Carrasco’s brother was said to have died shortly after his birth in 1967, but Cristina had her doubts. He was born at the hospital in La Linea (“The Line”) – a Spanish town that has grown up across the border from Gibraltar at the tip of southern Spain.

Over the years Spaniards have flocked to the town to seek work in the dock and shipyards and the other booming businesses of Gibraltar.

This meant that itinerant workers did not have their families to support them in the event of giving birth or a child’s death.

As Cristina’s mother was from Irun in northern Spain and had no family in the area, her son’s body was buried by the hospital.

The family returned each summer and left flowers on what was presumed to be his grave.

However, after works at the cemetery in 1980, the grave could not be found and it was subsequently discovered that there were no records at the cemetery, the civil registry or the archives of his birth, death or interment.

Last November Cristina told her story to the media and since then at least five other families have come forward with a similar tale in La Linea.

One of the latest involves a woman named Carmen from the Canary Islands. She came to La Linea in 1968 with her husband to work.

She arrived pregnant and, fearing all was not well, sought medical aid. On November 14 1968 she gave birth at the private Inmaculada Clinic to a son, who she was told soon died.

Neither Carmen nor her husband had any family in La Linea and the hospital told them not to worry – it would take care of everything.

It was when her daughter saw Cristina on the Antena 3 TV programme Espejo Publico and they discussed it that she found their situations had been very similar – and just a year apart.

She had never visited La Linea cemetery to visit the grave of her son, but now she decided to make the trip.

Again no grave could be found nor did the cemetery have any records of such a baby having been buried there in November of 1968.

She also visited the Archivo Historico Municipal in La Linea, which holds the records from that time. There is no record of his birth, death or burial.

One could argue that these were cases of poor record-keeping. But a more sinister explanation is more likely.

Judge Baltasar Garzon has gleaned facts and figures from various studies and has established that in wider Spain during the Franco era children were indeed taken from their parents without their knowledge and passed on to adoptive families. It seems that the story is the same in La Linea.

Garzon has estimated that during the post-war period of the Franco dictatorship, a staggering 30,000 babies were “reallocated” in this way.

It has also been reported that 200,000 pesetas was the price of acquiring such a baby in the 1960s.

Writer Benjamin Prado says in his book, Mala Gente Que Camina, that in Spain people think “such things only happened in Argentina or Chile which had much shorter dictatorships. The courts do not want to investigate in case the same thing happened here.”

In Madrid in the 1960s one of the standard jokes among children was to say to their parents: “Did you buy me in the Rastro?”

However, Prado points out that many did just that – bought them at the market – and hence many Spaniards do not know their true parentage or indeed who they are.

Now there are many web pages and social networks on this theme. The problem is that the Andalucia health system that runs the present hospital La Linea didn’t exist then and the birth and death records are in archives with those involved in recording them long since retired or deceased.

However, the thirst for the truth among those in their forties is strong and they will not be silenced until the truth is uncovered.

The prosecutor in Algeciras – the nearest major town to La Linea – has recently decided to open an investigation into these local disappearances.

Chief prosecutor Juan Cisneros has accepted the official reports by six families that involve births at the then municipal hospital in La Linea as well as two private clinics in the town.

Cisneros says these cases have to be investigated to find answers for the families involved and determine just what happened in the last century.

All the affected families have now joined an association called Anadir formed by Antonio Barroso.

He was adopted and suspects he was stolen from his true parents.

The lawyer Enrique Vila is taking all these cases to the High Court both in Cadiz and in Spain where there are dozens more. However it has to be recognised that because of the time that has passed any investigation will be difficult to pursue, a fact that was recently stressed by the head prosecutor in the Cadiz court.

A Spanish association of people searching for lost children or parents has filed a petition demanding that the attorney general probe allegations that newborns were being stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for decades – including as recently as the mid-1990s: here.

Spain’s Costa Blanca provided a safe haven for many Nazis, allowing them to enjoy a retirement without regret or atonement: here.

For the past two years the right wing opposition Popular Party (PP) in Spain has been embroiled in the “Gürtel” corruption scandal, which has implicated many of the party’s top officials and leading businessmen: here.

KABUL, July 26 – At least 45 civilians, many women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led force in Afghanistan‘s southern Helmand province last week, a spokesman for the Afghan government said on Monday.

The incident happened in Helmand’s Sangin district on Friday when civilians crammed into a mud-built house to flee fighting between NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops and Taliban insurgents, Siyamak Herawi told Reuters.

Like this:

A technician has testified that the general alarm system on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was partially disabled, one of a series of decisions sacrificing safety that led up to the April 20 explosion: here.

British transnational BP is trying to gag scientists and academics involved in the oil giant’s clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a US charity committed to academic freedom: here.

May 2011: The little known Leisler’s Bat – also known as the hairy-armed bat – is described as locally rare in England and is second in size only to the noctule bat with a wingspan of up to 33cm: here.